Thursday, February 12, 2009

A Tale of Two Cities

The city both fascinates me and scares me. It is full of enormous possibility, and at the same time, sometimes on the same day, when there is no air-conditioning, no electricty, you've been placed on hold for the third time, and you're stuck crawling in traffick (can you guess where I've moved to?), it is a holder of incredibily irritating problems. It takes effort, faith and intentionality to keep the promise of the city in front of you. A comment from Walter Brueggeman captures what I've felt while shifting cities:

"The conventional narrative of the city is a thin tale of acquisitiveness and scarcity that produces violence. In that tale, there is no break, no going back, no alternative. That tale is a tale so well and so often told that it seems a given. But it is not. It is an ideological construal, grounded in scarcity and brutality, that in principle admits of no alternative account of the city, that concedes nothing to the claims of an ideological teling, that in light of the gospel is false. The pastoral task is to wean us all away from that false tale of the city."

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